Joseph Ward

Background

About Joseph Ward

I am an educator with extensive experience leading modules in UK and comparative politics, political economy and public policy at both Birmingham and Sheffield universities. My research centres on how advanced capitalist states adapt, manage and curtail democratic systems. Adopting a comparative-historical approach, my PhD analysed the emergence of the referendum as a political tool in the UK in the 1970s. This work produced several publications on the interaction between key moments of constitutional change - the 1970s and post-2016 - and state reform in the context of wider shifts in British political economy. More recent work has engaged more deeply with debates in global political economy to explore how, in a context of neoliberal decline, liberal-democratic states have sought to curtail democratic freedoms and navigate capacity constraints in response to global economic pressures.